Last Unfinished Poem of the Year

Mending Wall
Set by Robert Frost
Derry, New Hampshire

Last Unfinished Poem of the Year

Under Some Tufts, the Substance of the Wall

…And the stone,

Reaching to touch  your hand, found you real

and warm, and lucent, like that earlier one.

And maybe a ghost, trying to hear your words,

Peered from the broken mullions

And was stilled.

                                                Wuthering Heights

                                                Ted Hughes

Maybe that’s what a stone wants of us after all, to

reach up to us like a mother or a lover and touch us

with as much love as it can muster, but because it is

stone it can only ever be a grievance or injury

or piece of wall, and gate-keepers all it suffers its gone-

solid silence .  Once, in the belly of the world, it was,

they were, liquid, inside it all, chuffed from molten

bone to molten bone and into the mouth and cheek

and laid bare there waiting against complacency.

In a dream they knew what they would be-

come: after the back-turning rejection of the hard

glittering lard, men would spend their entire

fortunes digging out to bruise and melt, to lighten

up the world to cough and die in when the smoke took

hold, as inevitably it will, to lift, the first Lazarus.  Listen:
how hot does it have to be to melt a rock, just any rock (ok,

yes, malleability varies by degrees, but…) see: some
never suffer themselves to come to liquid and they’ll go straight by

the way to ash…what had it, charged as it were to be,

and then, like all those other gods, gone off

to want, to eye blink agog at the first dawn of her,

waiting to be made into, what, a cloud?  Her you say?  Her?

Earth?  All of her now suffered under the palm

of someone’s hand?  Come to this: when Sylvia

set her hand down on the rock walls all three Bronte

women immortalized all that time ago high up the shires

in their York and Devon, there was a wind a bare bald
wind blown over the moors, and she was enough of a ghost

to know women like her would arrive to make the world

shake and tremble and rake the earth into veil

and velvet and scrape the glacial peak, reach to

the top of the heap, and have to rave and be brave enough

to never touch, cheek or teeth, even (and I’ve known

this, I’ve done this with stone against my own flesh

and bone) when against the heated meat, soft and sucked,

there’s some heat, some, if small enough itself,

to be (heaven is where we begin the believers tell me)

aren’t you with me in this, brought in out of the cold

and nursed back, blood wave after blood wave, to receiving

over our heads, under our feet, kin.  Simply kin.

High Point in Fog
West Quoddy Head